﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿What's on my mind?﻿﻿﻿

Northern lights photo by Hallgrimur P. Helgason. For more on cover design (by the author) visit

​​​Bjorn Larssen’s debut novel, Storytellers, captures the sights, sounds, and smells of early 20th century small-town Iceland and weaves a mystery that shows the complex, contradictory motivations in the human heart. Larssen’s tale shifts effortlessly from 1920’s Iceland (“Now”) to a romantic saga from a generation earlier (“Then”), told by a stranger to the book’s protagonist, Gunnar Karlsson.

Gunnar, a reclusive alcoholic blacksmith, reluctantly offers shelter to the stranger, Sigurd, who has injured his ankle on his way to a destination he refuses to divulge. In return for Gunnar’s spartan hospitality and his promise not to tell anybody Sigurd is there, Gunnar’s visitor tells a several-nights'–running story about an Icelander who emigrates to America, snatches up an American bride, and brings her back to Iceland. Gunnar’s promise to keep Sigurd a secret becomes increasingly difficult as women from the nearby village descend on Gunnar, determined to change him from a bachelor and a heathen into an upstanding (marriageable) citizen. Every time somebody drops in, Sigurd hides…but why?

Larssen’s clean, clear descriptions pull Iceland’s climate close as a damp blanket. When Juana, the American bride, arrives at her sweetheart’s village she notes, “The lack of trees was disconcerting. Surely there must be a forest somewhere nearby, she thought, as she climbed to the top of the mossy hill to better see her surroundings. Even the hill itself was strange. The soil was brick-red, then yellow, even pink. The few purple flowers that sprang up between the rocks were new to her…Both the ocean and the sky spread endlessly in front of her. To her left, the weather was clearing, and the water reflected the blue sky; to her right, clouds were gathering and the ocean looked cold and unfriendly…there was no church, no fields, not even fences!...The frosty wind whipped her mercilessly, and she had to hold on to her dress. Was this really it?” When Juana sees the Northern Lights, however, she gains an appreciation for her new home: “…her mouth opened in shock. Something that resembled green fire danced in the sky. The colors moved faster, then slower. They disappeared, then reappeared, regrouping stronger, covering the stars…. ‘Is this magic?’ she whispered. ‘Is it mountains changing shape? Is the sky burning?’….It was at that moment that the realization struck her, raising goosebumps on her skin: she had been living her adventure without even noticing. She was surrounded by magic, a prize more valuable than any jewel, more astounding than any story she had read before.”

Storytellers has a nice balance of description and conversation along with deft touches that delineate character as clearly as a die-cut stamp. Detail and humor give the story sparkle, while the machinations of the village women give the reader an urge to rescue Gunnar.

Also gripping is Larssen’s personification of depression, “the darkness” that plagues Gunnar and partly explains his need to self-medicate with moonshine. “Gunnar stared at the boiling pot, trying to gather enough strength to finish Sigurd’s meal. Sometimes splitting impossible tasks into smaller ones helped. Stand up. Pull the pot off the fire. Burn your fingers. Swear. Drain the potatoes. Mash them…no, too much, too fast. Reach for the masher. Move it up and down. Make a plate. Walk towards the room…Listen to the clock mercilessly bringing his death closer with each tick and tock.” Later: “He had no feelings, no hope, no choice. The darkness stood next to Gunnar, with her hand extended. He knew this would be their final encounter, the one that would never end. It felt as if the darkness was another person next to him, and he slowly turned his head to see…But there was nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps the air was even more stale, the sky and grass greyer. He looked at Hallgrimur’s sheep without much interest. Little dots in the distance, some of them white, some brown. Unimportant and inconsequential. Like you, the darkness remarked.”

Two things detract a smidge from this page-turner; the first is an elf that appears for no apparent reason and could be dismissed as an hallucination—except Gunnar’s dog sees it too. But then the elf disappears without a why or a wherefore (more on him later). The other minor distraction is occasional 21st century diction bubbling up (“gross her out,” “too weird,” “blown away,” “do their thing”).

In addition, Larssen crafts dead-on observations of human nature. When Gunnar briefly escapes small-town intrigue for a day of shopping in the big city, he notes, “Perhaps Reykjavik wasn’t so bad after all? It felt good to be a stranger, surrounded by other strangers, none of whom inquired about his religious views, tried to marry him, or asked questions about his money.” Another character pre-plans every detail of every encounter to ensure he will make the right impression: “…he would show up unannounced, blinking in the spring’s sunshine, overwhelmed by the beauty of everything. His hand would go up to cover his mouth at the sight of the church and dwelling, even if it was nothing but a painted shed. His passion and modesty would be noticed and praised….”

And there is a generous sprinkling of humor. Gunnar remarks at one point, “I just don’t like time. It’s bad for you.” And, later, “At least right now it was neither raining nor snowing outside, which Gunnar could tell by the fact that it wasn’t raining or snowing inside either.”

Author Bjorn Larssen was born in Poland, lives in the Netherlands, and is stone-cold in love with Iceland. He has a MS in Mathematics, has worked as a graphic designer and a blacksmith, and claims to have met an elf (which may explain why an elf appears in this book: perhaps Larssen owed him a boon?).

Larssen’s Storytellers takes you to an island in the North Atlantic a hundred years ago and sets you down in a village that may be surprisingly similar to your own home town. Recommended.

"Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost."~ Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Canto 1

Illustration by Gustave Doré of Canto 1, The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri (Dante lost in the dark wood)

Elsa and her BFF, Coffee Bean

PART I: A bump in the road

Until last month, I’d spent only four days in the hospital in my whole life: two when I was born and two when my son was born. But at the end of January, I ate some bad hamburger and experienced the usual symptoms of food poisoning. A week later when my symptoms persisted, I thought I might have picked up a bug. By the time a friend insisted I see a doctor, I’d been spending an inordinate amount of time in bed with my dog’s head on my belly.

I didn’t avoid medical intervention because I’m afraid of doctors or lack insurance but because I usually let my body sort itself out. Nevertheless, on February 13, 2019, I asked my neighbor to let my dog out if I wasn’t home by suppertime. I drove myself to Urgent Care, where three different people asked me the same set of questions. Within twenty minutes, a nurse wheelchaired me to Emergency.

They drew blood. I was ultra-sounded externally and internally. I was CT-scanned in a giant doughnut. I watched the clock, thankful I’d seen to my dog’s needs. The cats would be peeved to eat later than usual, but they would be fine. If I’d known how much later it would be, I’d have left their bag of food on the floor.

In Emergency, I tossed and turned on a hard cot. Finally, an angry OBGYN doc came in and said, “Why do you have pain at a SEVEN, as bad as having a baby, for one month before you come in? Your white blood cell count is 22,500!”

I squinted. Who are you and why are you mad at me? “What’s normal?”

“Five-thousand to 10,000! You have an infection!”

Why was he so angry? I said, “Well, first of all, it hasn’t been one month. It’s been fifteen days. Second of all, I didn’t come in immediately because I thought it was food poisoning or the flu.” He palpitated my painful belly and huffed out. A nurse stuck an IV line in my elbow and started a saline drip.

What on earth is going on? I would have asked more questions if I hadn’t needed to close my eyes for two seconds.

When I opened my eyes and saw daylight, I couldn’t believe it: I’d been in the ER all night. My poor critters! The angry OBGYN came back. “We are sending you by ambulance to Marshfield” (the mother hospital of the clinic in which I’d spent the night). Marshfield was ninety miles away.

“What?” I shook off my morning fog. “Why?”

“There is a mass in your abdomen, but I am not a surgeon. I don’t want to try to do a biopsy and then have to send you ninety miles for emergency surgery.”

“When will I go?”

“In about twenty minutes. We already ordered the ambulance.”

Let me interject a pertinent fact: I do not own a cell phone. I have a list of phone numbers hanging on my kitchen wall next to my old-school telephone. The only person who knew I had gone to the clinic was the neighbor I’d asked the day before to let my dog out at suppertime. The only phone number I knew by heart was my son’s.

There was a phone on the wall in my ER room but no phone books in the entire clinic. I dialed the only number I knew. “Honey, it’s mom. I’m being taken by ambulance to Marshfield for emergency surgery.”

“Wha…WHAT?”

Shoot. I woke him up. “It’ll be OK. Get hold of J. and ask her to take care of the animals.”

“I don’t have her number! Are you OK?”

“I’m fine. Friend J. on Facebook and tell her. Call Uncle D. and tell him what’s going on. I’ll be fine. Just, please, handle this for me.” There was a commotion in the hall. I looked up: the ambulance guys were standing in the doorway. “I have to go. I love you.”

They strapped me to a gurney, bundled up my clothes, and loaded me into the ambulance. I was starting to stress out about my animals and my students. How could I tell people what was going on? How could I pay my medical insurance premium, due in six days—the bill was at home.

It was a long shot, but I asked the ambulance driver to stop at my house and grab my laptop. “Please!” I begged. “It’s right on the way! I don’t have a cell phone. I don’t have any way to communicate with anybody. I have animals.”

When the ambulance turned off the main drag down my street, I nearly wept. We rumbled along for one block, and then I said, “My house is in the next block. I can get out and run in.”

(I was dressed in a hospital gown, attached to an IV, and strapped to a gurney. Temps were in the twenties with two feet of snow on the ground. My boots were in the bottom of my bag of clothes. Talk about being out of it.)

The driver said, “I’ll go in. It’ll be easier.” I gave him my house key and told him where the laptop lived. I forgot to tell him about my dog, who must have been scared when a stranger came in instead of me. (Of course she knew I was just outside. Dogs always know.)

The driver emerged. I thanked him for ten minutes, and then I clutched my laptop in the freezing cold back of the ambulance for nearly two hours. When we arrived in Marshfield, we drove past a cemetery across the street from the hospital, a practical if macabre real estate decision.

I was transferred from gurney to bed, and the painful IV jammed into the soft flesh of my elbow was connected to a saline drip. I immediately tried to get my laptop working, but I could not connect to the hospital’s temperamental wi-fi. When my surgeon came in to introduce himself, he sliced through the barriers between my laptop and the hospital’s internet.

Then he told me what was going on. "You have a tubo-ovarian abscess,” Dr. L. said. “We have to remove it.”

“OK,” I said. I had no idea how rare tubo-ovarian abscesses are in women my age (12 percent of cases) or how serious they are. Now I do.

A TOA is a puss-filled sack attached to an ovary. It develops when bacteria from the lower genital tract migrate to the fallopian tube and ovary. If the abscess ruptures (as happens 15 percent of the time), sepsis occurs. That’s when the body’s immune system stops trying to fight an infection and starts attacking the body itself. Sepsis kills. Prior to the advent of broad-spectrum antibiotics and modern surgical practice, the mortality rate associated with TOA was approximately 50 percent or higher. Even if a TOA doesn't rupture, 30 percent of TOAs are ﻿malignant. My tubo-ovarian abscess was the size of a stuffed baked potato, which is a way nicer thing to look at than an actual TOA:

Photo courtesy self.com.

Dr. L. continued, "We have to check adjacent organs for cancer. We may have to do a hysterectomy as well."

“Cancer.” “Hysterectomy.” If I were a younger woman who dreamed of more children or who hadn’t gone through menopause already, I might have been distressed about losing my lady bits, but now I told my surgeon, “Go ahead, take it out. If that’s going to be the source of problems for me down the road, might as well take care of it now.”

He said, “We’ll see what we find when I operate. I’ll remove the abscess and send it to the lab. And we’ll go from there.”

Was I worried about cancer? No. Worrying doesn’t change outcomes, it just wastes energy people need to deal with whatever obstacle they’re facing. For me, it’s more productive to gather as much information as I can so I can choose the best course of action. If my operation revealed I had cancer, I would deal with it, one step at a time, and I would come out the other side of it wiser and healthier. If cancer treatments didn’t work, I would die. Worrying wouldn’t change either outcome.

We’d have to wait and see.

PART II: Where am I?

I arrived at Marshfield Medical Center at noon on Valentine’s Day and spent the next three days hooked up to two IV lines: one fed me a steady drip of saline and the other dripped antibiotics to kill the bacteria in my blood. Thanks to the saline, I had to visit the lavatory once an hour, rolling my IV-pole sidekick along with me.

My primary caregiver was a traveling nurse from Michigan. Z. spends roughly 12 days a month in Marshfield on alternating weeks. It was my good fortune that her week in Marshfield coincided with mine. If I could have created the perfect nurse for my hospital stay, I couldn’t have done better than Z. From the moment I arrived, she seemed to know the right emotional approach to use with me: patience, humor, and matter-of-factness. For the first hour of my stay, I pounded on a laptop arranging for the care of my animals, my students, and my family—while Z. quietly focused on caring for me.

You’ve got to be a different breed of cat to be in a helping profession. Focusing on humans with all their complications and faults is hard work. Very little is predictable from day to day. You have to be ready for anything but ready to punt if something happens outside of “anything.” People in the helping professions work too hard for too little, but they are on the front lines of the truest, deepest human experiences: birth, sickness, death, first love, parental separation—you name it—so by another measure, they are richer than kings.

They go the extra mile. It’s a little, silly thing, but even though I had showers in the hospital, I could do nothing about my hair. Without intervention, my hair lies flat as a wet rug. My family and friends were an hour and a half away. The hospital had no hair products whatsoever. But on Monday morning, my Z. handed me a tube of hair gel she’d bought for me over the weekend so I had one less thing to stress about. What a gal.

And what a chameleon: an older woman in the next room didn’t quite know where she was. I heard her quavering voice ask unintelligible questions and Z.’s patient, loud, and clear answers over and over: “You’re in the hospital” or “We are making you better” or “What can I get for you?” I asked Z. if it was hard to adjust her demeanor for different patients. She said, “No. I know what they need. I meet people where they are. With some people, like you, I can have a normal conversation. With others…I have to keep it basic.” As a retired teacher, I understand "meet people where they are."

A hospital is a weird place for lives to intersect. It’s a place where life begins. Where it ends. Where comedy and tragedy randomly swap places. It’s a place where life doesn’t flow at its normal, leisurely pace. A hospital hurls people, ready or not, toward Inevitable Conclusions.

Since I didn’t know whether I had cancer, I was mindful of Inevitable Conclusions just before dawn on my first morning in the hospital when the phlebotomist came to draw blood. My window faced east. In the distance, the rising sun was turning the sky all shades of glorious. Z. came in and asked if I wanted her to close the curtains so the sun wouldn’t be in my eyes, but I said, “Who knows how many more sunrises I’ll get?” She left the curtains open.

Over the long weekend, I choked down bites of hospital food and met with hospital personnel, all of whom had agendas: one gal wanted to plan my eventual departure for home. One wanted to set up medical power of attorney so everybody had a road map for my departure into the hereafter. The infectious disease doc who was superintending my antibiotic regimen wanted to get me out of the woods ASAP because he was flying to Thailand in a couple of days to teach missionary doctors how to treat tuberculosis. Dr. T. wore a dapper bowtie and called me “professor.” He knew after talking to me for two minutes that I liked my facts neat.

On one of the days he came in, Dr. T. sat between my bed and the window as the sun was coming up. He said, “You’re sitting in a strange position. Are you in pain?”

“No. I can’t see you because the sun is directly behind you.”

He got up to pull the drape. He turned on the lamp, perched on the edge of his chair in a pose, and said,

“How’s that?”

“I think you’re ready for your close-up.”

Despite flashes of fun, being in a hospital isn’t. In a hospital, you can’t do anything free and easy. If you want a shower, you have to ask for it. You have to evacuate your bladder and bowels into a plastic contraption called a “hat” that fits over the toilet bowl and saves your excretions for divination ceremonies downstairs in the lab. If you normally drink three cups of coffee in the morning, you have to order all three at the same time.

For me, the worst thing was tripping the alarm on my bed at night whenever I heaved myself up to go to the lavatory. I’d shift, the bed would shriek, and pounding feet would thunder toward my room. I got scolded for trying to pee in private, but they re-set the alarm every time. If I could have reached the shut-off button without tripping the alarm, I’d have turned it off myself.

PART III: Going under the knife

My family drove all the way to Marshfield the day before my surgery. We signed medical power of attorney forms. I included a caveat on mine: “Artificial life support of any and all kinds may be provided so long as there is a reasonable hope/expectation that it will not be required indefinitely; if there exists a reasonable expectation that I will recover, keep me plugged in. If, however, a vegetative or similar state precludes any hope of recovery, turn out the lights.”

Later that day, sudden, stabbing pain above my abscess curled me into a fetal position. They whisked me out for another CT scan and put me on an immediate NPO diet (nothing by mouth but ice chips) in case they had to do surgery then and there. The pain turned out to have been caused by air bubbling merrily in my compromised belly.

I know. Weird. Carbonated beverages have air bubbles. Beer has air bubbles. Fish tanks have air bubbles. Kids blow bubbles. But when bubbles form in a place they don’t belong, they hurt. Since I couldn’t take painkillers by mouth, they decided to shoot Fentanyl into my IV. The cessation of pain was nearly instantaneous. I said to Z., “I can feel my skin.” Pain-free and a little loopy, I gnawed ice chips until I fell asleep.

In the morning, one more ultrasound gave my surgeon a green light for surgery. I crunched ice chips for breakfast and lunch and went down for surgery prep in the afternoon. The OR prep nurse chatted me up but neglected to do some shaving that would have saved me a tongue-chomping yank when the post-op nurses had to change my dressings. When I told the nurse I was a writer, a man behind the curtain in the cubicle next to me announced, “Hello Ms. Green. I am Alden Carter.”

Alden Carter. Author of Wart, Son of Toad. Between a Rock and a Hard Place. Walkaway. Up Country. Winner of six American Library Association awards. I babbled a fan-grrl greeting and squeezed his toe on my 114th toddle to the ladies' room.

Eventually, somebody shot Happy Juice into my IV, and I was wheeled into oblivion.

When I woke up the next morning, my throat was dry and sore because I’d been intubated. I was catheterized. Two plastic bottles shaped like grenades collected fluids from long skinny tubes that began in the cap of each grenade and ended inside my body. A plastic bag of blood hung on an IV pole, a narrow red line snaking from the bag to my arm.

My energetic surgeon bounced in. He said he’d removed the abscess along with my uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes. They hadn’t found any cancer. His finger tapped his orders on the white board: “Walk 3X today!” He was going skiing in a couple of days. As he left, I somewhat envied his brisk pace and the skiing in his immediate future.

For me, the next two days were brightened by suppositories, Heparin shots, grenade emptying, blood draws, and leisurely strolls with my walker around the nurses’ command center. On one of my walks, a nurse gestured at my walker and said, “That’s how you get out of here.”

By February 20, equipment began to disappear: heart monitor. One of the grenades. One IV, then the other. On my last night in Marshfield, I woke up an hour before dawn soaking wet: the last grenade was leaking. Two nurses came to clean me up. I apologized for the mess, and R. said, “Oh, this is nothing. This is a Two, not close to the worst.”

“What’s the worst? What’s a Ten?”

“Death.”

I said, “You mean, you go into a room and find a patient dead?”

“Yup.”

“Is it hard to get over something like that?”

“No. It happens.”

Nurses amaze me. First, anybody who wants to be a nurse must do incredibly difficult academic coursework. On the job, nurses deal with meds management and bodily fluids and people in pain. On top of that, they must be stoic enough to accept Inevitable Conclusions without being crippled by them. They do this for years.

On the third morning, my surgeon said I could go home at noon. I telephoned the friend who’d agreed to come and fetch me. I felt every bump in the road on the way home, but it was grand to sleep in a bed without an alarm. My dog was happy to see me, and for the next handful of days, she was a gentle and easy walker, although she must have wondered why we weren’t going on the marathon walks she was used to.

My stitches came out on March 11. A secondary infection that set in a week later should be licked by the end of March. All that’s left of my bump in the road is an eight-inch scar, a slight absence of internal organs, and six things I learned:

1. You will come back to yourself after surgery, but your body will heal before your mind does,

2. It does not lessen you as a human being to ask for help.

3. Some people will help even if you don’t ask.

4. Good and bad things don’t happen to you because you deserve them. Things just happen.

5. If somebody offers to pray for you, say YES. Some folks scoff at “thoughts and prayers” because that phrase has become synonymous with “not gonna lift one finger to change a bad situation.” Some folks credit prayer when it seems to have made a difference but get mad at God when it doesn’t. As for me…people prayed for me. My abscess was not cancerous. I am healing. It could have gone another way. It didn’t. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.~ Heb.11:1

6. The world is a kinder place than social and other media lead us to believe. My third hospital stay taught me I need to pay less attention to problems I can’t fix and more attention to my blessings: Family. Friends. Healing. Compassion. I need to be grateful for good food, robins, melting snow, sunshine.

It's the late 1950s in sexist America, before Title Nine, before the Women's Movement, and before the Equal Rights Amendment. Before Vietnam, the moon landing, Flower Power. A woman's primary role is to marry, bear children, and support her husband.

The main character, Joan Castleman (Close), a student at all-female Smith College, falls in love with her writing professor and ends up breaking up his marriage (although, as we learn later, if it would not have been Joan, it would have been someone else, for Joe cannot keep his pants zipped). Joan marries Joe, and she makes a Solomon-like choice shortly thereafter: give her art over to him so it can live rather than put her own name on her work, because doing so would mean nobody will read it (“Don’t ever think you can get their approval…the men [are] the ones who get to decide who gets to be taken seriously” Elizabeth McGovern’s character tells Joan). Joan is neither Joe’s first nor last extramarital affair, but she sticks with him through subsequent affairs because the only way her novels can live is if she lets her husband publish them under his name. Joe’s own work is pretty pedestrian, although he does serve as Joan’s editor. He also takes care of the children and keeps the house while Joan spends eight hours a day in “his” office banging away on a typewriter.3Over the years, as accolades pile up for Joe’s brilliant work, self-effacing Joan learns to anticipate Joe’s needs even before he’s aware he has them. She is elegant and graceful, and she always says and does the right thing, allowing extremely narcissistic and needy Joe to pretend he’s the genius in the family. Then Joe wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, and they travel to Stockholm for the ceremony. Joan must carry on her role as loyal, supportive wife, even though the praise for Joe’s brilliant work rightfully belongs to her. Watching the subtle twists of mouth and momentary fiery glances from Close makes it hard to tear your eyes away from her when folks are lavishing praise on Joe.

Christian Slater plays a journalist who sniffs out the truth that Joan denies because it would destroy Joe’s unearned reputation and jeopardize his (her!) prize. Close's real-life daughter, Annie Starke, plays Young Joan in flashbacks.

Regarding Pryce’s character, Joe Castleman—I kept thinking, “How would it be to be a serial plagiarist? To take credit for somebody else’s work, to accept praise for something you didn’t do?” Even though Joan’s secret role as the actual writer in the family would be hard for me to play, at least she gets to do the work in the first place, whereas vain, egotistical Joe…can’t. He is a hack that Joan spends her life propping up. Plus he’s a big baby about everything. I would have walked out on him, but Joan is a far better, far more patient person than I. She endures Joe for the sake of her art. Like thousands of people, Joan has decided, “For the sake of this, all the rest.”

If you are a writer who has given up a great deal for your art, you may see yourself in Joan. If you have ever been in a relationship where you sacrifice yourself for the sake of your partner, you may see yourself in Joan. If you want to see an Oscar-worthy performance with nuance in every glance and twist of the mouth, Glenn Close as Joan is worthy of your time.

The film first showed in Toronto, and Benjamin Lee of The Guardian did a dandy interview with Close, which includes an interesting insight into her (arguably) most famous role, Forrest in Fatal Attraction: “That character had a lot of secrets, but there’s no way for the audience to know what her past was. It’s only hinted at when she looks at him giving the bunny to his daughter and then throws up in the bushes...a psychiatrist said if she was molested at an early age, and what she was made to do made her gag and throw up, then that’s her trigger. Someone who’s been abused like that has absolutely no self."

The Wife got an 84 percent approval rating on ﻿Rotten Tomatoes﻿, but I thought most of the tomato reviewers were too hard on the movie. Maybe I just appreciated it more because I write, so I get it. Roger Ebert reviews the film here, but it's best to see the film for yourself. Close was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for her performance, and we'll find out on February 24 whether she takes the Oscar home.

Image courtesy The Daily Dot out of Austin, Texas, dated June 18, 2018.

Grandma Bessie Peterson feeding the chickens that helped her feed her kids.

My Grandma Bessie had twelve children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood. Grandma’s oldest was born nine years before the Crash of 1929; the youngest was born a year before the United States entered World War Two. So, most of Grandma’s children—my dad’s brothers and sisters—were home for most of the Great Depression (1929-1939).

Grandma’s husband refused to accept help of any kind from the government, including food for his children—a well-meaning neighbor once brought over government surplus food because he knew my dad and his siblings were hungry, but Grandpa made the man take the food back.

So, Grandma had to find a way to feed and clothe herself and her husband and all their kids. Grandma raised chickens, grew vegetables, and made dresses for the girls out of flour sacks. The family was so poor my father was not allowed to play outside in the winter because he did not have snow boots--he didn’t even have shoes.

The five-room house that this 13-person family lived in had two bedrooms upstairs. All five girls slept in one bed in the smaller 8X8 bedroom and all six boys slept in two beds in the (slightly) larger adjoining bedroom. Grandma and Grandpa slept in a tiny room off the living room. All day long, Marshall worked the farm while Bessie cooked, washed, cared for children, and made meals out of raw air and hope. They had an outhouse but no bathroom.

Then, one day, Grandma got a strange request from a neighbor.

The neighbor was wealthy. She had nice dishes and nice furniture. She kept a tablecloth on her table. She dressed smartly. But she was poor in one respect: she had no children. This wealthy woman took a shine to four-year-old Betty who had blonde curls, blue eyes and a big smile, just like Shirley Temple. The wealthy woman’s request of my grandma was this: “You have all these children and I have none. Won’t you let me have Betty? She will want for nothing.”

Before I tell you what Grandma said, let me ask…what would you do? Would you think about the easier life your little girl would have if she lived in a wealthy home, especially considering the hard times that Betty and her family were enduring in 1938? Would you take pity on this childless woman and gift her with a small part of your bounty so the rich woman could know the love of a parent for a child—so she could feel down to her toes the bond that changes your very soul and makes you a better person?

Would you consider how your other children would benefit once Betty was gone and there was more food and more flour sacks to go around? Would you say to yourself, “Giving her away would be better than making her suffer along with the rest of us”?

My Grandma knew her Bible inside and out. She knew the story of Solomon, the wise king of Israel, who in I Kings 3:16-28 was asked to decide a difficult case:

Two harlots lived in the same house, and each bore a son. One child died, so the mother of the dead baby stole the living child and replaced it with her dead one. The second mother recognized immediately that the dead baby in her arms was not hers. The women came before Solomon so he would decide which of them had the right to the child. Solomon asked for a sword and offered to cut the baby in two and give each woman half. The thief-mom said, “That’s fair,” but the baby’s real mother said, “No! She can have him,” whereupon Solomon gave the baby to the mother who was willing to give him up rather than allow anybody to harm a hair on his head.

Does this story illustrate that a parent should be willing to give up a child out of love so the child can have a better life as some insist? As my Grandma’s wealthy neighbor insinuated?

No. The story of Solomon's wisdom illustrates that a parent’s love for a child supersedes time, space, borders, governments, prison camps, and for-profit corporations. It shows that a parent who loves a child and a child who loves a parent never stop grieving when they lose one another. They never forget. According to psychiatrist James Gordon, founder and executive director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine in a 22 June 2018 piece ("How the Stress of Family Separation May Permanently Damage Migrant Children") in Rolling Stone, "Having been deprived of people who love you and take care of you, that's something that's there and it doesn't really go away."

My Grandma refused her wealthy neighbor’s request, and she kept her Betty away from this woman from that day forward. For my Grandma, and nowadays for other poor parents who love their children, to give up your child voluntarily is unthinkable, but to have your child stolen is unimaginable.

I guess Grandma knew that. I guess that’s why she refused to give up her child, even though that meant Betty would grow up eating corn mush at a crowded table with her family rather than growing up eating whipped cream with a silver spoon from a crystal dish and wondering how her brothers and sisters were doing.

Wondering when her mother was going to come and get her and bring her home.

My friend and I went to see Book Club yesterday because of the cast: Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, and Mary Steenburgen, veteran actors all. We figured no matter how silly the premise (Fifty Shades of Grey changes their lives—really?), these actors would elevate the material. If either of us had read Fifty Shades, we might have appreciated the movie more, but….

Sure, we laughed. How could we not with Diane Keaton doing a riff on her endearing Annie Hall shtick and Candice Bergen’s expressive eyes telegraphing her true feelings while her beautiful face maintains its composure? The other two leads didn’t have much to work with. Jane Fonda's powerhouse talent, in particular, was not needed to play this character, who is pretty much a Barbie with brains. Mary Steenburgen’s character is so fired up by Fifty Shades that she slips Viagra into her husband’s beer. My friend and I were so horrified that a wife would drug her own husband without his knowledge or consent that we were yanked completely out of the story. Just because a woman turns the tables doesn’t make drugging a person OK, and it especially doesn’t make it funny despite (because of?) the husband's unnatural tumescence.

Craig T. Nelson plays Steenburgen’s husband. He dug in deep to play a recently retired man trying to figure out who he is. Andy Garcia, Keaton’s love interest, played a pilot rightfully charmed by her. Don Johnson played a gent with whom I'd certainly take a long walk on a beach. The male characters in this movie, generally speaking, are appealing human beings. The settings are California gorgeous, and everybody in this movie has plenty of money.

Unfortunately, the screenwriters (Erin Simms and Bill Holderman) laboriously place ridiculous obstacles in front of our heroines’ slog to romantic fulfillment: obstructive daughters who treat Keaton like she’s about to go into a nursing home (I whispered to my friend, “If my kid treated me like that, I’d tell him to take a hike”); Fonda’s unwillingness to accept true love lest it break her comfy routine of sex-without-strings (and her subsequent weep fest after she rejects her lover?—puh-lease!); Bergen’s slacking off on her job as a federal judge because she’s busy with a dating app (really?); Steenburgen’s increasingly (and embarrassingly) desperate attempts to get her husband “in the mood.”

What bothered us most of all was the screenwriters’ basic premise that no woman of any age is complete without a man. Once the characters started reading Fifty Shades of Grey, even their decades-long friendship orbits the book like sad little satellites unable to escape its gravity. They seem not to be interested in anything else in their lives—not being a judge, running a hotel, maintaining a healthy marriage, adjusting to a death. Naturally, in this world, events in the wider world do not exist.

Worse, the screenwriters suggest that the characters shouldn’t have cared about any of those things in the first place because sex is Ground Zero, The Be All And End All Of life, Where It’s At, apparently the message of Fifty Shades of Grey as well. OK, OK—I’m here because of sex, and so are you, and so is my son, but is that all there is? Gotta say no.

My friend and I decided this movie is like a fancy dessert that's delightful to try, but it’s not something you want to eat every day. Please pass the meat and potatoes.

That’s how long it took from the first importation of African slaves into Britain’s North American colonies to the abolishment of slavery in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution (passed 1865).

Despite what is so obvious to us now, that human beings are not property, and despite our much-admired form of government that claims liberty as its most universal and prized gift—the plain fact is, we're hypocrites. Our nation doesn't insist on liberty for all; each of us insists on liberty only for him or her self.

We are slow to change. We are slow to do the hard work of fixing problems we ourselves create by our hypocrisy. This hypocrisy manifests itself every time we have another mass shooting and lawmakers spew that detested phrase “thoughts and prayers.” No wonder people get angry at God: those who offer prayers as though they’ve got God in their back pocket should be offering action. Their feeble attempt to make it look like they’re doing something—praying, I guess, which I doubt they are doing—tars their God with the same black lies they wrap themselves in. How dare they? If lawmakers truly were men and women of God, their faith would force them do something about guns.

Their alleged guidebook ("alleged" because they clearly are not guided by its principles) tells them flat-out that “Faith without works is dead (James 2:14-26).” Lawmakers’ failure to take action on the problem of mass murder of innocents proves they do not have faith. “Thoughts and prayers” means absolutely nothing to them. No action = no faith; words do not and can not resurrect dead children. One of the survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas Highs School in Parkland, Florida, said, "People keep saying your thoughts and prayers and all of these things, but it doesn't make a difference if nothing ever changes. This happens over and over again and people are dying, and it seems like it doesn't matter because, what are thoughts and prayers going to do when people are already dead?"

Furthermore, so-called patriots who demand “God-given liberty” forget/ignore/reject the fact that God-given life has to come first. There is no liberty without life; that’s why “life” comes before “liberty” in our Declaration of Independence.

Apparently, there is a national drive for students and teachers to stage a Walkout on April 20 (or March 14?). Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick said yesterday, “…unlike craven politicians and the NRA, teachers don’t get to hide from the victims of gun violence, or predetermine when the moment for hopes and prayers has lapsed into the moment for business as usual (an ever narrowing time span). We should listen to the teachers, who aren’t allowed to grow bored and move on.”

A Walkout. OK. I know we have to start somewhere, and I know a determined handful of people can force change because history proves that. But I also know that the drive to not only keep guns in lunatics' hands but also to sell even more of them (to a point where we're living in the Wild West again) gets its strength from many sources, and I'm not convinced a Walkout will cut off the snake's head.

First, like far too many evils in the past, owning guns masquerades as good, as "second amendment rights," and who would not be in favor of rights/freedom? So that's one source of sustenance for the gun lobby.

Second, people who have money want to make more money, and that means the gun industry has a ton of dough to spread around convincing folks in the first group that more guns = more freedom. This is genius. Gun-lovers buy more guns so they can be more free, so the industry keeps making money, so they can keep insisting with even more propaganda that guns equal freedom.

Third, we have a mental health crisis in this country. Stress is causing people to die years sooner than they would if they weren't stressed, and yet we tell "crazy" people to get over themselves and stop causing problems. We cut funding for mental health care.

The problem of too many guns in this country needs to be solved on many fronts all at once. I have marched in protests; I have walked picket lines; and, ultimately, the people with the power steam-rolled over me and everybody else and our sad little protest signs.

So what is left? Sometimes it takes 250 years for us to figure out we're wrong. Therefore, since the first mass shooting in America occurred in 1949 when a World War Two veteran, Howard Unruh, killed more than a dozen people in New Jersey, I guess we can expect change in 2199.

A local venue in my town holds a once-a-month adult storytelling event in its art gallery/meeting space. Each storytelling session asks grownups to tell stories on a theme: October’s theme will be Halloween/scary stories; I suppose November’s will be stories on a theme of Being Thankful (or maybe overeating); December is likely to feature holiday stories (although that could be overeating too).

September being the month when kindergarten through college students go back to school, last night’s theme was “school/learning/teachers.” Four featured storytellers performed. At an open mic session after they spoke, attendees were invited to tell their own stories. As a former teacher, I had a lot of stories, but my ingrained inclination is to let the “kids” go first, so by the time five impromptu storytellers spoke, the evening was over. I did not tell my story last night, but it’s on my mind, so here goes:

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a teacher. When my cousins and siblings played “school,” I stood at the front of the class and gave them assignments. I portrayed a teacher in a high school play. As a high school senior, I worked as a teacher’s assistant in the junior high. The teacher turned over her class of seventh-graders to me to teach for eight weeks. It seems astonishing now that a teen-ager would have been given that much autonomy, yet Laura Ingalls Wilder taught in a one-room schoolhouse from age 15 to age 17, so it’s not like the right person can’t teach, regardless of his or her age. I taught Greek mythology to my class of seventh-graders, and they loved it. They loved me. My mentor said, “You are a born teacher.”

But I saw how my mom, a history teacher, barely got her shoes toed off every day after school before collapsing on the couch for an hour-long nap before she made supper. She graded papers late into the evening after we went to bed. I did not want to live perpetually exhausted and a slave to my job.

So when I graduated from college, I did not graduate as a certified teacher. I headed off to New York City with a hundred dollars in my wallet and a fuzzy plan to make a big splash doing something in journalism or publishing, or maybe acting. I lived in the East Village. I went to museums. Auditioned. Wrote. Made friends. Spent my first Christmases away from home.

And yet, even though I loved living there, I skated on the surface of New York life because, deep in my heart, I knew this magnificent city was not where I was supposed to be. When I looked out my bedroom window at brick and mortar rather than at trees and grass, I knew I belonged in a greener place. I knew I needed to set down roots where my roots could grow. But I didn’t know where that might be.

One day, I flew down the steps of my apartment building on Fourteenth Street on my way to work, but when I got to the front door, a drunk was passed out across the threshold. I knocked on the inside of the door. I pounded. I yelled. He didn’t move.

I clicked the latch open and shoved. Finally, the drunk moved enough so my messenger bag and I could slip out. I strode toward the subway, late for work—and then I stopped, thinking, How can you leave a human being passed out and helpless? I ran back.

The man was still passed out. His clothes were filthy. His white hair was a mess. He stank. He had one of those noses severe alcoholics acquire over time, spongy and red and huge—think W.C Fields. I said, “Excuse me—can I get you some help? Do you want me to call somebody? Where do you live? Hello?”

He opened the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, the same shade as the blue morpho butterfly but even more intense. He moved lips like two purple slugs. Drool spilled down his chin. He opened his mouth and said, “Brrbcckkkkgg.”

Loud and slow, I said,“ Do you want me to call an ambulance? The police?”

Comprehension glimmered in those astonishing eyes. He said, “Gbblllsshzh. Bzzuh.”

He was so drunk he couldn’t talk. When he laid back down, I shrugged and went to work.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and my thoughts ultimately jelled around one idea: Blue Eyes had once been somebody’s baby. He’d been somebody’s little boy. He’d sat in somebody’s classroom. Hadn’t anybody cared about him? Hadn’t anybody made him feel he deserved better than ending up passed out in a doorway? Hadn’t anybody made him feel like he mattered?

And how many other blue- or green- or brown-eyed children in the world didn’t feel like they mattered? Could I help any of them? How?

People toss around the word “epiphany,” but as sure and bright as the sun coming from behind a cloud, I knew what I could do for these somewhere, someday kids I hadn't met yet: I could be their teacher.

I returned to the Midwest to earn a certificate to teach and got a job as an English teacher. Like my mom, I worked after-hours at my kitchen table: I filled big boxes with papers and dragged them home in a Radio Flyer, working literally one year at home for every five I spent in the classroom (yes, I did the math). And yet, despite all those years with students, I wasn’t certain I’d made the difference I’d hoped to make when I started.

That changed one day when I ran into a former student in the grocery store, a girl I’d had in class at the beginning of my career. When “Tiffany” saw me, she gave me a big hug. We chatted: she was the mother of two young adults; she liked her job; she and her husband got along. Then she said, “You know, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”

“At the grocery store?” I joked.

“No. When I took your stagecraft class, I wanted to kill myself.”

I sobered. “Wh-what?”

“I was planning to check out my freshman year,” she said.

A thick silence dropped around us. The other shoppers faded. She continued, “I’d had it with everything. I didn’t want to be here any more. And then I walked into your class. You gave me jobs that I had no idea how to do and expected me to try them. If I screwed up, you helped me. You praised me. You made me feel like I could do stuff. Like I belonged.”

I said, “You did belong. You were my kid.”

“I know. Everybody was your kid. But the thing is, I didn’t want to check out after I met you. When you showed me I mattered to you, I started to matter to myself.”

My throat was so tight, I couldn’t talk. So I hugged her. As I drove home, I thought, Even if Tiffany is the only one, it was all worth it.

Educator and anthropologist Loren Eiseley (about whom pal Ray Bradbury said, "[His] work changed my life") tells the story of a kid who tosses beached starfish back into the ocean. The story has gone round and round educational circles to a point that it’s become something of an eye-roller. Stop me if you've heard this one:

Bottom line: teachers, you make a difference, even if you don’t see it, even if you’re exhausted and overworked and underpaid and never run into one of your grown-up former students in a grocery store.

Question and Answer with Delaney Green, author of Jem, a Foreigner in Philadelphia (third in a series that includes Jem, a Girl of London and Jem, a Fugitive from London)

Given that I have been writing like a banshee for the last many months, I offer this Q & A by way of apology for not publishing a new blog post since March. Includes two excerpts from Jem, a Foreigner in Philadelphia, to be published this fall, book 3 of 7 in the JEM series,

1. Tell us about yourself.I taught Literature for 25 years to high school students. One day, we were talking about Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and I asked students “Might the Revolutionary War have been averted if England and America had been more empathetic toward one another?” After that discussion, an insistent young person who lived during the 18th century crept into my dreams for several nights in a row. This young person was Jem, who insisted that I write her story. The entire Jem series came in a chunk of seven books, which I sat down and outlined. Now, I have to write the last four books since Jem, a Foreigner in Philadelphia is Number 3.

2. Give a brief description of your book, Jem, a Foreigner in Philadelphia.Jem #3 begins during a storm at sea whilst Jem Connolly is a few days out from Philadelphia, where she has sailed to meet her destiny. She also hopes to evade her ever-more-aggressive enemy, Patch, who kidnapped her in the previous book. Patch works for Jem’s grandmother, the Duchess of Newcastle, but Patch has a secret arrangement with somebody else who wants Jem for an undisclosed purpose. Patch also serves the Dark, an evil force in direct opposition to the Light that is the source of Jem’s magical power, Second Sight. Within 24 hours of arriving in Philly, Jem meets Josiah Fox, a blunt wilderness guide; Betsy Arlington, an indentured servant besotted by Fox; Deborah Franklin, Ben’s wife, with whom Jem will stay while in the city; Sally Franklin, four years older than Jem and desperate to find a husband; the Franklin’s household servants; and Tillie Tapahow, a half-black, half-Indian woman who, like Jem, has Second Sight. Jem clashes with Fox and takes girl lessons from the Franklins. She makes an unexpected ally, a mortal enemy, and a forever friend—all of them critical components in the next stage of her journey into dangers in the great American wilderness she never could have anticipated. Marketers always ask what age the books are written for; I ask in return, what age are the Harry Potter books written for? Readers from 8 to 80 are interested in J.K.Rowling’s hero—I hope the same can be said of Jem Connolly.

3. Why did you write Jem, a Foreigner in Philadelphia?“Foreigner” was the next step in Jem’s journey—she had to live its events before she could go on. “Foreigner” gets Jem to America and introduces her people that will change her life. It shows Jem taking more risks with her magic. “Foreigner” allowed me to create the character of Deborah Franklin, about whom there is very little real-life information. The book allowed me to develop and deepen two ongoing themes in all the Jem books: first, good and evil exist, both take many forms, and humans can choose which they will embrace; second, there are things in the universe we shouldn't dismiss just because we don't understand them.

4. What’s special about Jem? The protagonist in Jem, a Foreigner in Philadelphia was born with a magical gift called Second Sight (acquired from both parents) that allows her to hear what animals are thinking, to know by touch which diseases lurk inside complete strangers, to see visions of future places and events that don't make sense, and to get others to do what she wants simply by touching them. Jem’s magic develops as she tries to do different things, and—as with any skill—the more she practices, the more mastery she gains. Jem learns in Foreigner that she can trust other people, something she has been reluctant to do to this point. She learns that she doesn’t have to handle every single problem all by herself.

5. Is this book part of a series?Yes. The book is the third of seven. At the rate of one book per year, the last will come out in 2021—but that’s an optimistic schedule. Historical fiction requires a great deal of research. My advantage is that I already dreamed Jem’s whole story (I know how it ends), so my major task is putting the legs under what I already know is going to happen—that is, unless Jem takes me on a detour, which she’s done before….

6. What can you tell us about your writing process and writing style? I get up early in the morning (4:30 on a good day, but usually 5:15). I start the coffee, feed the critters, and write for three or four hours. I take a break, walk the dog, eat a late breakfast, and get back to work. By 2 or 3, I’m done for the day. My brain just can’t function any more. If I need to, I edit or do marketing work after I come back from the gym, but usually I relax in the evenings so I can do it all again the next day. For the first Jem, I wrote the entire story then went back and researched to make sure I had not inserted any historical error other than inserting magic and taking liberties with the history of famous people. For the next books, I intermingled research with writing. This seems to work better, as the things I learn can then inform the writing. I still start each day by writing the story in longhand on yellow legal pads. I don’t turn on the computer until that’s done. Then I fire up the ‘puter (research whatever I wrote if necessary) and word-process that day’s segment of story. As far as my style goes, I don’t use words that weren’t in use at the time, which is a personal choice that has sent me down many a research bunny trail. I also use quite a bit of dialogue, as I have a theater background and I…well...I just like to eavesdrop. It might take four hours of research to inform one line of text. What I hear most often about my books are comments about authenticity; here are some quotes from reviews of the first two JEM books:

“The writer has created a very believable London”

“she brings the reader right into Great Britain life in the mid-1700s”

“By the time I reached the one-third mark, I felt that I had a solid grasp on Jem's backstory as well as an insight into her psychology. I was fascinated with not only the core story, but also with the way the author wove historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin into the tale in such a way that it seemed not only possible, but also plausible.”

7. The setting of Jem, a Foreigner in Philadelphia adds to the texture of the story. Can you tell us why you chose to set the story there?Philadelphia is Ben Franklin’s home base. It’s where his family and oldest friends live. It was an incredible mixing pot of peoples and cultures in the early years of America. By 1750, Philadelphia was the most important seaport in the colonies. Merchants (one of whom had been Ben Franklin before he retired and entered politics) dominated Philadelphia society, and about 40 of them controlled much of Philadelphia's trade. Philadelphia was so important that it was the capital of the new United States of America from 1790 and 1800 while Washington, D.C., was being built. In order to accurately portray 1760-61 Philadelphia, I purchased a number of useful books, particularly Philadelphia, a 300-year History, published by the Barra Foundation, which includes photographs and old maps. I can't write historical fiction without a map.

8. The idea of finding the truth is strong in your book. What about that idea interests you?My father was a stickler for absolute, strict adherence to the truth, no matter the situation or who might be hurt by brutal honesty. Telling the truth was simply what you did in my house. One of my earliest epiphanies was reading Polonius’s advice to Laertes, “To thine own self be true,” which suggested that truth sometimes depends on point of view. Truth is complicated. Truth is something we act upon that also acts upon us. For example, some people can find a sack of money and keep it; other people could not bear to live with themselves if they did that. (Recently, nearly $30,000 turned up in a paper bag in a parking lot in my town; the finder turned it in. Would I have done the same? Sure, but I would have fantasized for a month about what I could have done with the money.) One time, my brother dinged a car in a parking lot. Nobody saw. He left a note. The car owner called and said, “My insurance will cover the damage—but I just wanted to talk to the last honest person in the world.” To me, truth is having convictions and standing by them, yet not trying to impose your convictions on other people. This is why Jem is open to learning about other religions, other ways of life, other explanations for why she and the world exist. A kind of weird corollary to this is the idea that woman have the right to be fully human, to be fully all they can be. In Jem’s time—and in our own, unfortunately, even in our own country—females got (and get) the short end of the stick in terms of developing their talents and fulfilling their potential. This is a corollary to finding the truth because it is a flat-out lie that women aren't capable of doing whatever they have the talent to learn and the will to accomplish. There is no way a person’s plumbing should decide his or her destiny. But it does. Jem thinks that’s a silly and wasteful idea. So do I.

9. What was the most challenging part of writing this book?What was most challenging was pushing myself to get Foreigner right when I was raring to go on to #4—I am so jazzed to get Jem into the wilderness and interacting with people of the Seneca nation. I am excited to develop her relationship with Josiah Fox. Another challenge is being patient with the process. You have to go back and forth with the cover designer. You have to wait *forever* for your book to get edited. It takes even longer than forever to address your editor’s questions once the editing is done. Another problem for me is marketing. I would happily sign books all day long—but it is so hard for me to do my own marketing. I feel very self-conscious about shoving my book and myself in people’s faces—and yet, that’s what a self-published writer is supposed to do. I don’t do it very well. I just write and hope for the best.

10. What drew you to this particular story?Simple: Jem started talking to me. I listened. This particular period in history, the 18th century, was the bridge between the medieval world and the modern one in terms of medicine, politics, science, art—you name it. So many towering figures lived then, pushing and shoving the world in the direction they wanted it to go. So many other people were pushed aside in that great heave into the modern world. I wanted to show a person eager for change but sympathetic toward people affected by that change, an interested and interesting human being without any agenda other than understanding herself and how she fits into the grand cosmic scheme of things. Somebody who could befriend a horse yet battle a demon. Jem is somebody I like and respect. She is the kind of person I would be honored to be friends with, although I’m pretty sure I couldn’t keep up with her.

11. What other books have inspired you?Early influences were Madeleine L’Engle, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau. Science fiction. Shakespeare rocked my high school world. My favorite modern authors include Robin Hobb, Diana Gabaldon, and Brandon Sanderson (whose stable of researchers I envy). While I was working as a high school English teacher, I was given Hobb’s first Farseer book one Christmas; by February, I had read all her other books. Hobb owns and practices writerly magic. Her Fitz and Fool are my personal benchmark for true devotion in both fictional and personal relationships. Gabaldon is a master of humanizing historical persons and events. Let’s see—Patrick Rothfuss is a Wisconsin author whose The Name of the Wind I enjoyed as well.

12. How did you come up with the title?I paid for a professional critique of my book. The critiquer said I was not doing myself any favors with my title. But I stuck with it because I knew the book was part of a series, and I wanted each title to set forth the protagonist as well as the place and “role” she would occupy in that book.

13. What is your favorite passage in the book and why?One scene I like is the shipboard scene in chapter 14 between Jem and Josiah Fox where this interchange takes place:

“Maybe you’re made of stone, but the men below aren’t,” Fox said. “Look, Kitten, men are wolves: we mate for life. We’re always looking for the one that fits, and we try on different women until we get it right.” “Try on!—really, Mr. Fox—” “Your way with the men—a smile here, a touch there, the way you listen—it’s no wonder they start to dream you might be the one that fits. I’d never have guessed at the Billet a little thing like you has the heart of a lion.” He lifted a curl that had straggled over my face. “And that’s to say nothing of the outside. You looked good enough to eat at Sally’s party. This chocolate hair of yours was pinned up that night.” He tucked the curl behind my ear. “And you had some bobs in your ears trying mighty hard to be green as your eyes.” He fingered my earlobe. “And you smelled like apple pie.”

I also enjoyed creating a personality for Deborah Franklin based on what little facts one can find about her. This passage from chapter 11 answers the question: Why didn’t Debby join Ben all those years he was in London?

“My husband has asked me scores of times to take ship and join him in London. I have stood a score of times before the shipping office with money in my pocket to buy passage.” This astounded me. “Why didn’t you do it?” “The water,” she whispered. “It wants me. Every ripple of every body of water is a little clawed hand snatching at my feet. Where do the little hands go when they fail to catch a foot, Jessamyn? They go back to the river, back to the shore, back to the ocean where they wait with thousands of other little hands to pull ships down to the deep.” Her face had gone white, but her neck was flushed red. She pleated and unpleated her apron. “But, Mrs. Franklin,” I said, “boats are caulked tight against water. Ships sail back and forth over the Atlantic all the time. British ships are the best in the world, made of good American oak.” “I know. I know it all. My husband reassures me with all those arguments and more. But the water wants me.” I thought of the growling ocean the stormy night Freddie was hurt on the Red Queen. Tillie’s jungle river. My waterfall. Was Mrs. Franklin…sensitive… to the power of water? I waited. “I have never told this to anyone”—she swallowed—“as a child, I played along the river. We all did. One day, we found an abandoned dory in the water near the riverbank. It had a hole in it, but we got it up on shore and patched the hole as best we could with weeds and mud and our stockings. We were children. We got some boards for oars and got the thing out in the river. And the current took it. We were having such fun! Riding past the tall ships and the fisher folks and waving at the sailors. “But then we saw we were far past our little bit of shore. We tried to use the boards to row back, but the current was strong and our oars were poor. We drifted to the very mouth of the Delaware before our repair came loose. “We waved at passing boats, but we were being carried out to sea. We were taking on water. I began to cry. My shoes and frock were wet you see, and I suddenly sensed the great, dark, living gulf of water beneath the leaking boards of our dory. It…wanted us.” “How did you escape?” “A small fishing boat saw how low we rode in the water. They were on their way out. If we had cast off five minutes later, they would have missed us.” “They rescued you.” “They did. They pulled Jimmy and I on board. By the time they got us both, our dory was done. It sank like a stone.” “You were meant to live, Mrs. Franklin.” “Or I cheated death.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “To this day, I feel the water is angry. It wanted me then. It wants me still. To this day, even when I step out on to the wharf, I feel uneasy. I can’t look down at the water for fear I will see little hands reaching for me. So naturally, a sea voyage is out of the question.” “But, Mrs. Franklin, it is only water.” Even to me, my words sounded puny compared to her fear. She eyed me. “So you, like my husband, think only that which can be observed is real?” “Well, no,” I said. “But I have never seen hands in the water.” “But you have seen the hand of God working in your life?” “Yes, of course.” “Did you see the hand itself?” “No.” “So, not all that exists can be seen by the naked eye or even under my Ben’s microscope. Some things that are, are invisible. And, like everything else that is visible, some forces are good and some are bad. For me, Jessamyn, water is bad. It will not forgive me for cheating it.”

14. What aspects of your own life helped inspire this book?My mother contracted polio as a young teen and lost the use of her right arm, but I didn’t know what “handicapped” meant until I was a teen-ager. My mom never let her handicap slow her down. She never even mentioned it: I had a mom who couldn’t raise her arm, no big deal. Mom’s day-to-day life showed me what it truly means not to let adversity decide how you’re going to inhabit your one and only life. Jem is determined in the same way not to let any kind of stupidity, any kind of silly rule, any kind of evil shove her down a path she has not chosen for herself. Because of my mom’s example, it never even occurred to me that being a female should minimize my own chances or choices. Nor should being a male. Every human on the planet owns the right to determine what his or her life should be. That’s the very least each of us deserves during our three score and ten.

15. What can readers hope to learn from this book?I hope readers accept that humans do not and can not ever have an explanation for everything that exists—and that that’s OK. I hope readers let go of their need to control others and accept that people have the right to decide for themselves what to believe in. I hope readers won’t limit their personal choices to what other people tell them is acceptable because of their gender, sexual orientation, skin color, religion, background, culture, ethnicity, and so forth.

I was a high school English teacher for 25 years before I retired to write full-time. This winter, I got a call to do a stint of teaching, only my students wouldn’t be teen-agers; they would be adult learners at a community college. People my own age-ish. Hm.

When I taught teen-agers, I learned early on that a lot of the job is about personal connection. The students must like you. By “like,” I don’t mean the teacher and the teen go out for breakfast and paint one another’s toenails. (Ew.) “Like” means the student accepts that even though the teacher’s subject is something lame like, say, English grammar, the class is OK because the teacher is fair (“fair” means the teacher cuts people slack now and again). The teacher does not bludgeon one student with another (doesn’t play favorites). The teacher is not a hypocrite who says one thing and does another. For a teen, a teacher should be consistent, clear, and helpful without being a pushover. Bonus if the teacher is funny or even playful.

This kind of teacher will be able to pull some effort from most students, although it must be acknowledged that a great deal of teen-agers’ passion is directed at their peers and activities rather than their academics. It also should be noted that it’s even tougher to get work out of students who don’t like the teacher, because these students suffer at their desks like prisoners serving a sentence.

With adults, however, liking the teacher is moot. With adult learners, optimal learning means squeezing out everything the teacher offers and then rolling the tube tight to get out that last little dab. There’s nothing passive about it. Whereas a teen-ager, generally, is reluctant to ask for clarification or extra help, an adult insists on it. Adult learners work jobs and rear families and have now added the burden of school. They don’t want to mess around. They want to learn, dang it, and if you’re their teacher, you’d better deliver.

I LOVE THIS ATTITUDE. When I sit down with an adult student, I deal with an equal who has gray hair and wrinkles and lumps, somebody who pays bills and hauls kids and endures hardship and knows there is no free lunch, not no way, not no how. Adult learners do not feel entitled, except insofar as they have paid for the privilege of learning and insist that it happen. An adult learner already has a full life but wants a better one. Whereas teen-agers are trapped by compulsory education laws, adults have chosen education as a means to an end. A teen-aged learner might count off the days until freedom rolls on down like a mighty river; an adult learner is that supermarket sprinter who’s dashed in for milk because he’s got to have supper on the table in one hour. They want to git 'er done.

The United States has 1.5 million adult learners, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Some adult learners are just out of high school. Some of them are great-grandparents. All of them are in school because they see education as a path to a living wage and a life of dignity. Learning new things can be fun, but going to school is hard, doubly so when it's only one item on your daily list of things to do and triply so when your skills haven't been brushed up for 25 years and many of your fellow students are half your age.

Therefore, it’s no exaggeration to say an adult learner is on a hero’s quest. The man who defined the hero’s journey in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), author Joseph Campbell, says the hero’s journey occurs when an ordinary person is called to leave behind the familiar and embark on an adventure in search of something important. The hero may be protected early in the adventure by a mentor or may acquire allies along the way, but ultimately faces a final battle. The hero returns home, having defeated his adversary and won the prize, which the hero then shares with those who were left behind.

Illustration by Ryan Dunlavey from the ACTION PHILOSOPHERS! Graphic Novel

What I didn't anticipate when I began teaching adults was that many of my students would become my heroes. They've left what's familiar to go on an adventure in search of something important, and when the adventure is over, they'll bring something valuable home. Let me introduce you to a handful of them (I’ve changed names and skewed details to preserve their privacy.):

“Deb” and her husband have endured hardship and raised a family. She’s training for a career that will put herself and her husband in a better place when they retire. Deb hasn’t been in school since before computers were invented, yet everything nowadays is done on the computer. Imagine somebody shutting you in a horse barn and ordering you to saddle up a creature you’ve only ever seen on TV. Luckily, this stint in school ain’t Deb’s first rodeo.

“Ruby” is divorced. Her ex hid their assets, so Ruby is back in school for the first time in twenty years so she can train for a job that will let her pay her bills and put food on the table. Ruby can’t study in the college library as long as she’d like to because she has to be home when the school bus drops off her kids. Once the munchkins go to bed, though, Ruby hits the books.

“Alan” is ex-military. He’d hoped to make the Army a career until he was injured. Now, Alan is working on a business degree despite physical pain from his injury that never quite leaves him—which means Alan’s battle doesn't end when he goes home at the end of the day. He soldiers on anyway.

“James” suffered a brain injury some time ago. He can’t remember things very well from day to day, so his learning path doesn’t run in a straight line. It loops. James has been in school for a while, though, because he likes to learn. He perseveres. He runs his race one mile at a time, round and round, without dropping out, and if he passes the finish line more than once and keeps on running, well, that's just the way he rolls.

“Felicia” was born here, but her parents came from another country. English is Felicia’s second language. Felicia has worked alongside her parents in low-wage jobs, but she wants a better life for herself, so she’s studying to make English her first language—not by birth but by choice.

“Sally,” five feet nothing in her stocking feet, always wanted to drive an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer truck. At age 72, she started a truck-driver training course, half of which was online. She couldn’t even turn on a computer when she started school. Despite that, Sally got top grades and outscored everybody in the behind-the-wheel portion of her coursework. Sally had a dream job offer in hand when she graduated, and now she's a road warrior.

These six and others like them have allowed me to mentor them on their hero’s journey. Thanks, guys, for letting me tag along.

This was going to be a post about the holidays, but I can’t make myself write about end-of-year celebrations because the central fact of my life right now is that I lost my best friend on December 19, 2016.

My best friend came into my life ten years ago on a crisp day in October; he was my birthday present to myself. The day he came home, dry leaves skritched over the sidewalks. Jack-o-lanterns and fake spider webs sprouted on every other house in my neighborhood. My friend was younger then, and everything he saw surprised or delighted or, sometimes, scared him. A gaggle of kids walking to school attracted him like light attracts a moth. A tin Real Estate sign clanging in the wind sent him running for cover.

But regular meals, a roof over his head, a soft bed to sleep in, and plenty of affection showed him that he was home. No matter that he had to learn on his third day with us that he should not jump up on the kitchen table to help himself to an entire baked chicken. No matter that his mom had to learn to let go of problems at work earlier than she wanted to because she had somebody at home who needed to go outside.

You’ve guessed that the best friend I’m talking about is my dog, Homer, who died unexpectedly just six days before Christmas of a burst liver tumor.

Until Homer came along, I’d been a cat person. I was afraid of dogs, having been chased by a German Shepherd when I was a kid. Plus, to be honest, I’d never been inclined to own a dog. Dogs were so…needy. They were kind of icky, what with the drool and the doggy stink and the poo—I used to watch my elderly neighbor trot past my house behind her Schnauzer, plastic bag fluttering in her hand, and I’d imagine wrapping my hand in a bag and then wrapping that hand around warm dog droppings. Disgusting!

Then one summer I agreed to dog-sit my friend’s Bichon. I enjoyed it. I began to imagine the unimaginable: maybe I could have a dog.

I approached dog adoption like I approach everything: I studied. I took a 90-question compatibility test and chose the breed that would best suit my lifestyle, the Golden Retriever. I studied costs, life span, energy level. I bought a book so I could learn how to train a dog. I decided on a mixed-breed shelter dog or a Golden rescue rather than a purebred animal, as so many deserving dogs need homes. The last thing the world needs is more puppies, I decided. I haunted Petfinder. I visited shelters. I registered with a rescue group. It took three months to find Homer, who was half Golden Retriever and half Mystery Meat (guesses ranged from Collie to Great Pyrennes).

Unfortunately, a couple of days after I brought the dog home, I was pretty sure I’d made a mistake. Everything about dog-ness was new to me. Certainly, one can make predictions about an animal’s temperament based on breed or upbringing or sex, but studying dog as a concept isn’t the same as living with an individual dog.

Despite my misgivings, there was something about Homer I wanted to know and needed to learn, something this two-minute video captures, although I hadn't learned it yet at the time. And so he stayed.

Homer in his favorite spot in summer, just outside the back door in the shade where he could keep watch.

And on the ninth day, God looked down on his wide-eyed children and said, "They need a companion... Somebody who'll spend all day on a couch with a resting head and supportive eyes to lift the spirits of a broken heart." So God made a dog.

Homer loving on Chip.

For ten years, Homer blessed my life with his sweetness, his gentleness, and his tolerance of my faults. He forgave my ineptitude, my clumsy learning of his language. He was mostly obedient unless he detected a squirrel or a rabbit in the yard; then, nothing could stop him from chasing the beastie away or, if he caught it, shaking the life out of it. He was a sometime-pest, an always-friend, a furry baby, the fellow that forced me to keep normal hours and got me outside twice a day, rain or shine. No matter how cold it was in the depths of January, he did his puppy dance while I geared up to walk him in the 20-below-zero darkness over icy sidewalks. No matter how hot the July afternoon, he did the same dance when it was time to go out, although even on the hottest days, he never wanted to wade out into the river any deeper than his chest. He loved to walk in the woods, and so on three out of four outings, he pulled me toward the long path through the trees. I obliged him only one time out of ten, and yet he always forgave me—and he never gave up trying to entice me into the forest. Another way to spell “dog” is “H-O-P-E.”

Homer taught me that you learn about yourself when you try to communicate with another species. Wanting to understand my dog forced me to be vulnerable and to truly pay attention rather than insisting the communication be only one-way. Like a mother learning her baby's cries, I had to learn my dog's different barks. About three weeks into my being a new dog mom, Homer tried to tell me that somebody was breaking into my neighbor’s outbuilding. I shushed him, but the next morning, my neighbor discovered her shed lock broken on the ground and a can half-full of gasoline beside it. We’d had a rash of arsons in our town; we believe the dog’s barking scared away whoever had come to burn down her shed. After that, I paid attention when the dog tried to tell me something. I tried to read his eyes. I learned to watch his ears. I learned that his weird, guttural throat noises meant I was supposed to look up because he had something to tell me.

Homer was never one of those dogs that barks at the drop of a hat, but he made other noises. He woofed, under his breath, like that uncle who hangs back at family gatherings listening to everybody and once in a while gruffing out a “Hmph!” which isn’t a clear statement of anything in particular so much as it is a reminder that he’s listening to every word. If anybody knocked on our door—including me with an armful of groceries—Homer gave a bugling “Bwoo-oo-oo!” to let the house know somebody wanted in. If my brother stopped by, Homer made ecstatic mock-whiny puppy noises and groveled at my brother’s feet. Homer wasn’t a Velcro dog with me, but he could never get enough of my brother. “Go eat the cat,” Dan would suggest, but Homer would not leave his side.

As regards the cats, Homer was their buddy. They all grew up together, Homer bridging the gap between one generation of cats and their successors. One day, Homer spent fifteen minutes following his best buddy, Chip, from room to room licking him and wagging his tail, waiting for the cat to settle so they could nap together.

It is nice to reminisce about my dog, but it hurts. While introducing former New York magazine executive editor John Homans's book What’s a Dog For?: The Surprising History, Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Man’s Best Friend, Maria Popova talks about “the inevitable pain we invite into our lives when we commit to love a being biologically destined to die before we do and the boundless joy of choosing to love anyway.”

Quite simply, choosing to love means choosing to hurt. A couple of days ago, I ran into a dog park friend whose big hound, Cooper, died three years ago. “I still cry about Cooper,” she said, hugging me. “I had to get therapy when he died. You will never forget Homer, and he’ll always be with you. Homer was your soul mate.”

Initially, “soul mate” sounded too extreme. A soul mate is somebody who loves with a love that passeth understanding, a love that accepts all, endures all. A soul mate loves purely with his whole heart. Soul mates feel such depthless devotion to one another that the sudden exit of the beloved is like the cutting off of a limb: shocking, painful, crippling.

Maybe Homer was my soul mate. I have certainly never felt so deeply and completely loved for my own sake. I have never felt so bereft.

And now Homer's ashes sit on a shelf in my house. I will never see him again.

Like the deepest water in the ocean slowly rolling to the surface to get oxygenated and then slowly rolling back down to the deep, so it is with grief. It comes in waves. Our rhythms change when somebody passes. We have to learn new ways of doing things. For many days, at both breakfast and lunch, I was about to set my plate on the floor to be "pre-washed" until I remembered my pre-washer was gone. When I brought home groceries the other day, as always, I schlepped everything out of the car in several trips to a pile beside the door because a golden ball of fur used to come barreling out the minute the door opened. The other morning, I wondered if I could get away with writing one more page before it was time to walk the dog—then I remembered there was no dog to walk.

When somebody passes, no matter the species, there are rituals that you do only at such a time. Five days before Christmas, I washed Homie's bed and scrubbed his dishes and washed the rugs. Four days before Christmas, I vacuumed up the dog hair in my living room. Three days before Christmas, the vet called to tell me Homie's ashes already had come back from the crematory, so I drove out there to pick up the walnut box containing the physical remains of my friend. Afterward, I took his leftover toys and food to the animal shelter. While I was at the shelter, I wandered into the dog department just to look at who was there. Then it hit me: I wasn't looking for another dog. I was looking for my dog.

EB White writes a lighthearted obituary for his dog, Daisy, and the fact that White applied his greatest gift to his canine friend honors Daisy with the best White had to give her.

John Updike’s poem "Another Dog's Death" is not as light-hearted; it is, rather, a simple elegy that shows how well the man and the dog knew one another:

For days the good old bitch had been dying, her back pinched down to the spine and arched to ease the pain, her kidneys dry, her muzzle white. At last I took a shovel into the woods and dug her grave

in preparation for the certain. She came along, which I had not expected. Still, the children gone, such expeditions were rare, and the dog, spayed early, knew no nonhuman word for love.

She made her stiff legs trot and let her bent tail wag. We found a spot we liked, where the pines met the field. The sun warmed her fur as she dozed and I dug; I carved her a safe place while she protected me.

I measured her length with the shovel’s long handle; she perked in amusement, and sniffed the heaped-up earth. Back down at the house, she seemed friskier, but gagged, eating. We called the vet a few days later.

They were old friends. She held up a paw, and he injected a violet fluid. She swooned on the lawn; we watched her breathing quickly slow and cease. In a wheelbarrow up to the hole, her warm fur shone.

As for me, I put one foot in front of the other. I take it one day at a time. I get up. I eat food. I try to work. I don’t walk the dog. I layer my broken heart in logic and common sense and wait to feel less pain and more gratitude for the incredible blessing that my big, silly boy brought: he made me a better person. Like the lyric from Wicked says, "Because I knew you, I have been changed for good."

Homans says “It’s not that a dog accepts the cards it’s been dealt; it’s not aware that there are cards. James Thurber called the desire for this condition ‘the Dog Wish,’ the ‘strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.’… Even in the most difficult times, dogs are cheerful and ready for experience.” I laugh, even now, at this video of a dog (whose goofiness reminds me of my boy) when the dog finds out his dad just brought home a kitten.

My dog taught me that I can’t control everything and that I shouldn’t want to. He taught me to enjoy the breeze, to appreciate every meal, to be grateful to be alive. Homer was the best of dogs, gentle and sweet. I hope when I go to heaven he will be the first to greet me, like Katie greets Chris in this clip from What Dreams May Come.

RIP, my beautiful, happy, beloved pup. I will love you for the rest of my life. I will be grateful that I knew you as long as I live.